Whether or not you belong to a formal religion, your dreams will, from time to time, remind you of the vast and vibrant spiritual horizons surrounding you, horizons that extend far beyond the limited sphere of your waking life. Sometimes dreams speak with unmistakable clarity, and their spiritual meanings are immediately transparent. Most times, though, dreams express themselves in a subtle language of symbols, metaphors, and an infinite variety of imaginative scenarios. These kinds of dreams are more difficult to understand—which is another way of saying that your waking ego needs to broaden its perspective in order to process the new spiritual information flowing into your mind during an intensified dream.
If you have a dream that feels spiritually significant and you’re curious what it means, here are four questions that can help you uncover its deepest energies for insight and transformation.
1. What is the most vivid element in the dream? What is the place, character, or moment that has the greatest energy and intensity? Focusing on this element (or elements, there may be more than one) is important because this is where your dreaming imagination has generated something special and dynamic, something that is drawing your attention with unusual intensity. Invite this extra-powerful dream element into your awareness and let it live and breathe alongside your waking consciousness. If you do nothing else, this will create a living bridge between the waking and dreaming realms of your existence.
2. Are there any sudden shifts or abrupt changes in the dream? Any unexpected transformations of characters, settings, feelings, or plot development? It’s helpful to focus special attention on these sudden shifts because in most cases they are points at which your dreaming imagination is bringing something new into your dream. A moment of sudden change in a dream is a moment when novel possibilities are coming into your awareness, when new connections are being made across different realms of your life, reaching back to your past and stretching towards your future. If you experience a moment of surprise in your dream, ask yourself if this might be an opening to a new aspect of reality you never consciously noticed before.
3. What is the strangest, most bizarre, most unrealistic element in the dream? The majority of dreams are actually fairly accurate reflections of our ordinary daily lives. We dream about familiar people, places, and activities. But sometimes your dreaming imagination goes beyond your ordinary life, and you find yourself in the midst of something incredible, extraordinary, counter-factual, and simply impossible according to Newtonian physics. Again, try inviting this bizarre element (or elements) into your waking awareness, and reflect on what exactly makes it so contrary to regular life. Consider the possibility that this dream element is challenging you to look beyond what is, to consider what might be. Are you too limited in what you assume to be possible and impossible?
4. Are there any patterns of symmetry and contrast in the dream? As you reflect on your dream as a whole, look for the appearance of classic oppositions, such as up-down, in-out, light-dark, big-little, slow-fast, live-dead, cold-hot, child-adult, male-female, and profane-sacred, among many others. The parallels and symmetries among these opposites can give you valuable insights into the deepest spiritual structures and symbolic frameworks of your life. Even more valuable are places in your dream where the opposites collide, where there’s conflict and tension between them. These clashes, although sometimes frightening, can generate creative new perspectives and transformative energies that can lead you beyond the limits of either-or thinking.
References
Bulkeley, K. (2000). Transforming Dreams. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
